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If I Tell You ... I'll Have to Kill You
Australia's Leading Crime Writers Reveal their Secrets
By Michael Robotham Allen & Unwin
Copyright © 2013 Michael Robotham
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-74343-434-5
CHAPTER 1
KEEP THE BODIES COMING
by Shane Maloney
So far I've killed around seventeen people. It's hard to be completely sure without digging them up and counting them all, but I've been at it for a while now and it has to be somewhere in the high teens, minimum. Among others, I've dispatched a leading-hand storeman, a promising young athlete, a talented painter, a shifty property developer, an abalone poacher, the owner of a trattoria in Moonee Ponds, a senior union official, a refrigeration mechanic, a public policy analyst, a gym jockey and both sons of a trucking magnate. I've frozen, drowned, bludgeoned, shot, speared, squashed, run down and incinerated them. And I still haven't finished. Lead a life like mine and you're under constant pressure to keep the bodies coming.
Some of those who died were innocent victims. Some were only getting what they deserved. Mostly I kill men. The one time I killed a woman, it cost me a lot of grief. I dressed it up to make it look like an accident, but it was entirely deliberate — her loss was indispensable to the advancement of the story, so she had to die.
Perhaps at this point I should say that I am not an inherently violent person. My childhood was not spent torturing caterpillars. My mother was not killed in a bizarre sex slaying on a vacant lot in Pasadena. My inner demons keep mainly to themselves. I would never dream of stabbing someone over and over again in the eye with a shard of broken glass then kicking him until his spleen came out of his ears, no matter how much he might happen to deserve it. I didn't deliberately set out to become a serial killer. My homicidal rampage began entirely innocently, but it is a well-known fact that these things have a tendency to get out of hand. One thing leads to another and God knows where it will all end. Death has a life of its own.
It all began when I decided to write a novel. At the time, I didn't know much about the literature game, so I thought I'd start somewhere on the fringe and work my way towards the centre, picking things up as I went along. Eventually, I felt I'd figured out enough to write the Great Australian Novel and win the Peter Carey Prize for Best New Tim Winton. Crime fiction seemed a good place to start. It is a second-rate literary form, a hot bed of low expectations, so its appeal was obvious. For a brief moment I considered trying my hand at fantasy — but there's only so low a man can be expected to stoop.
Precisely because it makes no great literary claims for itself, crime fiction takes a lot of performance pressure off the would-be novelist. Free from the need to produce lapidary sentences and profound ruminations, the writer can get on with the job of taking the reader for a ride. But contemporary crime takes in a lot of territory and I wasn't quite sure where to begin. So I started in the usual place — by killing somebody.
My victim was a Turkish foreman in a meat-packing works in Broadmeadows. I locked him in a freezer until he expired, then stuffed his snap-frozen carcass between the pallets of spring lamb. His job was simply to get the ball rolling, to precipitate the ensuing action. He had a name but little in the way of a life history. That would come later, uncovered in the course of the story. All that mattered for the moment was the fact that he had met an untimely death and there was clearly more to the situation than met the eye of the relevant authorities.
I got the idea from my own experience. Once as a teenager, when I was working a school-holiday job, my workmates locked me in a freezer until I turned blue and began to shake uncontrollably. It was all jolly good fun, a bit of a lark, but it sort of stuck in my mind.
With a corpse suitably furnished and puzzle successfully posited, it was time for the protagonist to arrive. In accordance with the inexorable logic of crime fiction, a suspicious death summons forth the sleuth. In most crime fiction, the killer-catcher is acting in a professional capacity. They are a representative of those institutions of society charged with the task of investigating crimes — a police officer, a coroner, a forensic pathologist or whatever. Their mission is sanctioned and supported by the apparatus and resources of the state. The investigator acts on behalf of the rest of us to seek the truth and ensure that justice is enacted.
Alternatively, the sleuth might be a private detective, a hired specialist, a gumshoe. He might be a twenty-dollar-a-day professional, a Philip Marlowe hanging his shingle for the passing trade. Operating on the fringes of the law, the gumshoe doesn't so much solve crimes as turn over rocks, setting in motion a train of events which might, or might not, reveal the truth. This process is facilitated by asking unwelcome questions and being struck over the head from behind, knocked unconscious and waking up in a puddle of piss.
The protagonist might also be an inspired amateur, a Miss Marple who treats murder as an intellectual puzzle, a mystery to be solved, a brainteaser. Such a character proves her mental and moral mettle by penetrating the significance of the fact that the pistol shot was concealed by the striking of the dinner gong by the butler, whose footprints outside the conservatory window can only be explained by young Reggie Fernacker-Clakke's sudden interest in Eunice Crabapple's collection of rare Lepidoptera.
Take your pick: forensic procedural, gumshoe, cosy, gangster — in crime fiction par excellence, one writer's meat is another writer's fast-acting, almost-undetectable poison derived from a rare plant found only in a lost valley in the Hindu Kush. Whatever shape they might happen to take, detectives are usually driven by easily deciphered intentions. In police procedurals, the investigators are government functionaries, with all the organisational complications that entails. Murder is antisocial and its victims have rights, including full access to the latest in electron microscopy and DNA matching. Detection is a team effort and the individual investigators are there to provide the psychological dimensions and the personal quirks.
Over the course of crime fiction's 150-odd-year history, the protagonist has evolved and multiplied into myriad forms. The shambolic homicide dick with whisky on his breath and soup stains on his tie has transmogrified into the female forensic pathologist in a Chanel suit. Sherlock Holmes has become a traditionally sized African lady from Botswana and the hard-boiled Philip Marlowe is now a feisty goil from Noo Joisey or a half-Danish, half-Inuit Marxist glaciologist. The job descriptions, jurisdictions, gender and methodologies are continuously changing, but the fundamental structure persists — discover the crime, untangle the facts, winnow the suspects, plumb the motives, test the alibis, apprehend the perpetrator, avenge the wrong and beat the clock. Whether amateur or professional, the habitual crime-solver is inured, if not hardened, by familiarity with the grisly details. Inspector Rex, for example, takes homicide in his stride. Ritual disembowelment one minute, a ham roll the next.
It all seems pretty straightforward, but at my first foray into the genre, I began by making a serious category error. It was a mistake which has dogged me ever since. Instead of employing a member of the killer-catching community as my protagonist, I gave the job to a rank novice called Murray Whelan, a minder, political fixer, hopeless romantic and inadvertent detective.
Wondering what an ordinary bloke might do if he began to suspect that a murder had gone undetected, that a death which had been quickly dismissed as an industrial accident was actually the result of foul play, and that somebody was getting away with it, I came up with a self-starter protagonist — an everyman equipped with no brief to investigate, no forensic expertise and no real evidence. And by way of motivation, I gave him not a copper's world-weary determination or a gumshoe's tarnished code of honour, but a mish-mash of nosiness, scepticism, loyalty, sense of justice and, when the baddie eventually comes at him with a sharpened screwdriver, pants-shitting terror.
Despite these fundamental design flaws, my accidental hero stumbled onward, uncovering clues and upsetting the furniture. By the end of the book, the body count was a modest two. The victims, to a greater or lesser extent, deserved what they got. No innocents were harmed. No evil greater than greed was unmasked. Murray Whelan, having come face to face with murder, was physically shaken but not existentially stirred. Actually, it all worked out rather well. By that, I mean the book got published.
But a taste for murder, once acquired, is not easily shaken off. Hercules Poirot didn't stop at just one victim, nor Philip Marlowe, nor Cliff Hardy or John Rebus. No sooner had my bloke settled back into a semblance of normal life than another body popped up. That's the other thing about crime fiction. Once word gets around that you've got blood on your hands, you're expected to live up to your reputation. I was now duty bound to start offing people at regular intervals. I must become a serial killer.
Things soon began to get seriously out of hand. The death rate took a steep upward turn. From two bodies in my first book, I went to five in the second. I took a young painter with a complicated past, got him drunk and drowned him in the ornamental moat of an art gallery. I then pushed a harmless old queen down a steep riverbank. And soon after I got a gun. It's not hard to do. There are a lot more of them around than most people realise. And once I had a gun, people started to get shot. For a while there, it looked like my bumbler would be lucky to escape with his life. Eventually, of course, the villain got his comeuppance, but only after a long trail of corpses had been delivered to the morgue.
By novel number three, I was facing a new pressure. Pace wasn't matching productivity. I wasn't killing fast enough. My American publisher complained that it took almost 100 pages to get to the first fatality. Why the long lead-up? In Red Harvest, Dashiell Hammett had killed 28 people by Chapter 5. I'd barely managed three — or was it four? I'd been concentrating on neither numbers nor speed but method. I started with bare hands and worked my way up to a javelin.
By the end of book four, the bodies were really starting to pile up. I ran over the first victim with a semi-trailer during a torrential pre-dawn rainstorm. I did this in order to eliminate crime-scene forensics as a plot element and leave the coppers baffled. Forensics are a bitch and the more baffled the gendarmes, the more room for manoeuvre. I then shot a truckie on the side of a country road and left a fake suicide note beside his body. This was a direct consequence of the protagonist sticking his big bib in the wrong place and exacerbating an already hairy situation. This further compounded my hapless hero's expanding repertoire of motives. As well as a natural tendency to want to right wrongs, he must also clear his name and get revenge on the bastards who offed his truckie mate.
In general we humans like to think that the motives for murder are fairly straightforward. Psychopaths do it because they're batshit crazy. Sociopaths do it because they don't give a shit. Other motives are equally easy to understand. They are derived from our most common human emotions — fear, pride, envy, anger, greed, lust and all the other deadly sins except sloth (few people are ever killed in a frenzy of unbridled sloth). Personally, I'm somewhat inclined to the view that as a motivating factor, motive is overrated. In a lot of premeditated murders, it seems to me, there is very little meditation, pre or post. At one point, I killed a family friend in a blind rage fuelled by anabolic steroids. Not only was there no real motive behind it, there was no subsequent memory. I got the idea from a real case. This idea of a motive being unnecessary doesn't just apply to murder. As Mailer or Roth or Hemingway or one of those guys once famously said, the motive for writing a novel is to write a novel.
In the contemporary crime novel an element of unresolved sexual tension is more or less obligatory. The protagonist must not only collar the killer, he must also nail the girl ... or boy ... or cat. It's a multi-gendered world out there, folks, and the electricity must be taken into account. And when you murder the love interest, you really ramp up the stakes. Which brings me back to the woman I mentioned earlier, the one whose convenient demise caused me grief. She was an innocent victim, collateral damage in a shootout between police and two prison escapees. She was one of my better creations, at least as far as my hero was concerned. He loved her. Which is precisely why I killed her.
In that particular book, the bullets are whistling by page three. I saw off a man's ear and feed it to a dog. There's a fight to the death in a dinghy. The cops arrive in a blaze of gunfire. It's all very cathartic. Every new book demands fresh blood, but suitable victims are not always easy to find. In the case of my most recent novel (I use the word 'recent' in the ironic sense), the suspicious death is decades old. The detection is half-arsed. The sexual tension is peripheral to the case. The only potentially violent character is overcome in a flurry of activity a few pages from the end. The issue at stake is a dead man's posthumous reputation. It wasn't really a murder anyway.
Still, they called it crime fiction, so that's what it must be. Which tends to take the pressure off a bit, I'm pleased to say. Murder can be exhausting and it's nice to ease back from time to time. But then, inevitably, you begin to feel a certain hankering.
Now where did I leave that axe?
* * *
MY RULES
There are no fucking rules. There are only fucking examples. Read some fucking books. Broaden your vocabulary. 'Fuck' can function as most parts of speech, but that doesn't mean you should limit yourself. Have a concept. Do your research. Don't procrastinate. Find inspiration. Believe in yourself. Steal. Use spellcheck. Think about all the possibilities. Persist. Get a proper thesaurus. If it doesn't work, start again. Learn from your mistakes. Get over yourself. Start as close to the end as possible. Make me care.
CHAPTER 2
THE THREE C'S
by Marele Day
I have walked through abandoned railway tunnels, been to the morgue, to police headquarters, into seedy nightclubs and drunk my fair share of whisky — all in the name of crime writing, but even a seemingly mundane task like buying a piece of office furniture can take on a heightened reality when you're a crime writer.
I was looking for a two-drawer timber filing cabinet and spent a couple of days visiting office furniture suppliers, new and second-hand, to no avail. I systematically went through the Yellow Pages with not much luck either. I dialled the second-last number on the list.
'You don't see many timber filing cabinets nowadays,' said a voice that sounded genuinely apologetic. There was a pause, an almost furtive pause. 'Could I interest you in a credenza?'
I paused, wondering if he was propositioning me. 'Credenza' is such a luscious, curly, opulent word; even saying it was something of an erotic experience. Credenza. Was it Italian for tumescence, some euphemism for the act of sexual congress? A crescendo, a climax accompanied by music? Maybe business was slow and he was bored. I was at the end of my list. I couldn't afford to treat this as an obscene phone call. Besides, I reminded myself, I was the one who'd called him.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from If I Tell You ... I'll Have to Kill You by Michael Robotham. Copyright © 2013 Michael Robotham. Excerpted by permission of Allen & Unwin.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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